There are known in the prior art various machines for conveying currency in the form of notes from supplies of notes of various denominations to a delivery location. One type of such machine is an automatic teller which delivers the money to be dispensed to a delivery area behind a normally locked access door. If the amount of money in the delivery area is correct, the door is opened to afford the customer access to the money. One such system is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,482,057.
Another type of cash dispenser intended to facilitate the work of bank tellers or cashiers or the like is actuated by the teller to cause the apparatus to deliver the required sum of money to an open tray which is immediately accessible to the operator of the machine. Machines of this type generally are of the counter top type. One such machine is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,660,822. The control system for this machine is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,709,914. In operation of the counter top dispenser shown in these patents, bills are drawn from the bottoms of the respective supply and conveyed along a generally horizontal path to an output stacker which places the bills in the an escrow area within the machine. The delivery tray is held in its inoperative position sufficiently long to ensure that all bills which have been drawn from the supplies pass by the shelf into the escrow area. In this way, the requirement that the teller or other operator remove the bills from the delivery tray following a malfunction is eliminated. In addition, it facilitates accounting for money which had been placed in the dispenser in that all bills which have been withdrawn from the supplies either should have been delivered to the customer or remain in the machine.
In addition to the foregoing, I provide the machine with a mechanical lock which prevents the delivery tray from being moved to its inoperative position to gain access to the escrow area when the machine is idle, for example. While preventing such movement of the tray, the lock is readily disabled upon the occurrence of an error signal to permit the tray to be moved to its inoperative position in response to such an error signal.
One object of my invention is to provide an under the counter cash dispenser of the type which delivers money to an open delivery tray.
Another object of my invention is to provide a currency dispenser which does away with the requirement that the operator manually remove bills from the delivery tray in the event of a malfunction.
Still another object of my invention is to provide a currency dispenser having a delivery tray which is normally locked against movement to its inoperative position by a mechanical lock which is readily releasable upon the occurrence of an error signal.
A still further object of my invention is to provide a currency dispenser which is simple in construction and certain in operation.
Other and further objects of my invention will appear from the following description.